The Posts report under the Analytics tab within your publishing dashboard (next to Queue) provides a history of all of your published posts. Looking at your posts individually allows you to draw comparisons and see patterns around which posting times might be working best for you, and what type of content your audience might be most engaged with.
This article includes the following sections:
Report features
The features within the Posts report differ depending on if you have a Free or a paid plan, as shown in the table below.
| Free plan | All paid plans | |
| History of posts | 30 days | Full history |
| Analytics on posts | ✓ | |
| Share Again feature | ✓ |
Performance metrics
The table below provides an overview of which performance metrics are available for each channel.
| Likes | Clicks | Comments | Shares | Reach | Impressions | |
| Facebook Pages | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Facebook groups | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||
| Instagram business accounts | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
| Twitter profiles | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ (Mentions) | ✓ (Retweets) | ✓ | |
| LinkedIn Pages & profiles | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||
| Pinterest business accounts | ✓ (Repins) |
📝 Please note, the Impressions metric for Twitter is only available on our paid plans.
Metric descriptions
| Likes | The number of likes your post received. |
| Clicks | The number of clicks your post received. For Facebook, this includes clicks anywhere on the post, e.g. link preview, image, avatar, timestamp. This is Facebook's "post clicks" metric, as opposed to their "link clicks" metric. |
| Comments | The number of comments on your post. |
| Shares | The number of times your post was shared. |
| Reach | The number of unique people who saw your post. |
How to share posts again
With so much content on social media now, posts can easily get missed and lost in the flow, and we understand that you need to get maximum visibility. The Share Again feature allows you to add published posts back into your queue to share a second time. Due to social networks becoming much stricter on the duplication of content, we recommend using this feature lightly, and making changes to your post text or image before sharing them multiple times. You can find guidance on re-sharing posts here.
Common questions
What could cause discrepancies between the data seen in the Posts report here and data in native analytics?
Facebook has two different (but similar-sounding) click metrics. "Post clicks" are clicks anywhere on the post, e.g. link preview, image, avatar, timestamp, while "link clicks" are clicks that specifically take place on the link. In this report, we show "post clicks", so these will appear higher than "link clicks" if you’re looking at Facebook Insights.
Additionally, after working closely with a few customers, we have discovered that the data displayed in Facebook Insights does not always seem to be accurate. However, the data available in the CSV export (also from Facebook Insights) is accurate. We believe there are one or two unresolved bugs on Facebook’s side that mean the data shown on the screen, does not always represent the real data. To corroborate the data, we recommend that you export it to CSV. The data there should more accurately reflect what you see within our reports.
If you’re on a paid plan, click metrics will be pulled from Gnip, which is Twitter’s enterprise data service. All of the data we get from Gnip is on a per-tweet basis and we're only able to check for new engagements a limited number of times on each tweet. In practice, we're able to get data for seven days following a tweet being published. That means if you sent a tweet on Monday, we’ll keep checking it for new engagements and impressions until the following Sunday. After that, we can no longer re-check the tweet, and from then onward, its metrics will remain the same within Buffer. Twitter, on the other hand, will continue to track data perpetually, meaning the data will continue to be updated as you receive more engagements after seven days.
There are a few reasons you might see a discrepancy between the data in Buffer and the data in LinkedIn Analytics.
First, it’s important to note that we are only able to track clicks on shortened links. If link shortening is turned off, click metrics will not be available. Additionally, LinkedIn unshortens links before they are displayed in the link preview below the text. We are not able to gather data for clicks on the unshortened link in the link preview, so we’ll only be counting the clicks on the shortened link within the update text. This can sometimes result in a discrepancy between click metrics in Buffer compared to LinkedIn Analytics, depending on where the post is receiving clicks.
Second, Buffer pulls click metrics from Bit.ly. Bit.ly counts the total number of times a link has been clicked. This means that if the exact same link has been shared more than once, or to multiple social channels, the number you'll see will include all of those clicks. LinkedIn, on the other hand, will simply count the number of clicks on that one specific post. Learn more about this here.
Third, the data we receive from LinkedIn only includes the number of comments on the post itself, and not the number of comments/replies on comments. This means you may notice a lower number of comments in the Posts report within Buffer compared to LinkedIn Analytics. For example, if your post had five comments, and someone had replied twice on one of those, we would report a total of five comments, whereas LinkedIn would report a total of seven. Unfortunately, this is not something we can change right now due to this additional data not being available via LinkedIn's API.
Are native posts included in the Posts report?
While native Instagram posts are included in your publishing dashboard's Posts report, native Facebook and Twitter posts will be included only if you're subscribed to a paid plan. Native posts are not available for LinkedIn or Pinterest.
How far back does the data go?
On the Free plan, you'll see a history of posts from the past 30 days. On our paid plans, you'll see a history of posts from the past 2 years. When you subscribe to a paid plan, or if you connect a new Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter account and you're already subscribed to a paid plan, we will backfill the past 200 native posts. Unfortunately, we're not able to backfill for LinkedIn or Pinterest. Please note that we'll show posts that have been sent from when you added your social channel to Buffer.